Today is the feast of one of the patron saints of this blog, St. Justin Martyr. From his Second Apology (ch. 13):
For I myself, when I discovered the wicked disguise which the evil spirits had thrown around the divine doctrines of the Christians, to turn aside others from joining them, laughed both at those who framed these falsehoods, and at the disguise itself and at popular opinion and I confess that I both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, Stoics, and poets, and historians. For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation impacted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.The word for 'Word' and 'word' here is, of course, logos, which can also be translated as 'reason'. The mention of 'seed' is a reference to the Stoic idea of logos spermatikos, seed-reason, which in this particular case is our own partial rational participation in Reason itself; as he says earlier (ch. 10), "For whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Logos."
